Tag: Atheism

Richard Dawkins is among the world’s best-known atheists, having debated just about every major contemporary Christian apologist, including John Lennox, his Oxford faculty colleague, as well as philosopher William Lane Craig, and Ravi Zacharias.

Screen shot from Facebook.

Whatever you may think about Dawkins’ arguments against the existence of God, or how he performed versus Lennox, Craig or Zacharias, my interest here is in a strange but significantly revealing aspect of the evolutionary biologist’s recent statements about … cannibalism.

It is a commonplace belief among prominent contemporary atheist thinkers that the universe is strictly materialist, with nothing remotely non-material, or “spiritual,” as has been commonly understood for thousands of years.

But John Lennox, the British mathematician, philosopher of science, and Oxford professor emeritus, detects some interesting trends among the atheists he often debates in public forums.

“I think we’re getting to the state now where serious atheist thinkers are beginning to re-examine the kind of naturalism that reduces everything to physics and chemistry,” Lennox said during a recent discussion with Talk Radio’s Dave Rubin on The Big Conversation.

Check out this excerpt in which Lennox explains and includes examples:

“The first question smart gamblers ask is, ‘What are the odds?’ There’s good reason for it; playing the odds gives them the best chance at winning.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

“However, the odds for many things we see in our universe coming into existence without any intelligent input or intentionality are so mind-numbingly improbable it requires an irrational dose of blind faith to even consider them.

“How mind-numbing, you ask? I’ll give just one brief example. Take living cells and the biological proteins that compose them. If we consider just one simple living cell consisting of only 250 short proteins, and those 250 proteins each consist of only 150 amino acids (they can consist of up to 30,000 amino acids), the odds that these 37,500 amino acids (250 proteins X 150 amino acids) could all arrange themselves into a sequence where the cell could actually function is only one chance in 10 to the 41,000th (that’s a one followed by 41,000 zeros.

“That’s a lethal problem for atheism. Even if the universe were 14 billion years old (that’s the oldest estimate even the most ardent atheists give it), there hasn’t been nearly enough time for 10 to the 41,000th attempts at anything. Not by a long shot! And that’s only one example out of countless others we could offer.” — Tom Hammond, What Time Is Purple, pps 16-17

Black and white, cats and dogs, Christians and atheists. These pairs are just about as opposite as it is possible to be. But there is one fact that is so basic, so essential to logic and clear-thinking, that Christians and atheists agree on it.

Twister, Master of the Tapscott household

(As for the other two pairs, our black Lab Twister definitely prefers his color and the company of other canines to that of, you know, those arrogant, self-absorbed furrballs.)

NBC “Dateline” cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace — author of the highly recommended “Cold Case Christianity” — explains what that most basic fact is while responding to a probing question from a college student about how to explain the existence of a god:

Believe it or not, early in the decades following Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection, His followers were considered unpatriotic atheists by the most powerful government in the world, Rome.

As Ryan Leasure writes on The Poached Egg on this Palm Sunday, Roman Emperors expected subjects to bow down to the Roman pantheon of gods in an act both of loyalty to Caesar and religious piety.

Christians — in a dramatic act of separation of church and state —refused to worship the Roman gods and were thus viewed officially and by many Romans as atheists. But there was also an economic angle involved, as Leasure explains:

Proponents of atheism like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Sam Harris have become prominent public figures, thanks to their intelligence and debating skills, science knowledge and formidable public presences.

They are helping prompt the renewal of a much-needed public debate in the U.S. and Europe on the Theory of Everything (TOE) questions: Why is there something rather than nothing, why does the universe exist, why are human beings in it, and what happens to us after we die?

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